Their father, Al Jones, likes to tell a story of a time when the boys were about 13 and 11, and the family was at the Copeland's restaurant on Veterans Boulevard. The brothers already were imposing presences then, and another diner asked them if they played sports.

Indeed they did, Chad and Rahim -- then Al Jones Jr. -- replied. And what was their ambition?

"To play football in the NFL, " Rahim replied. Chad said he saw himself also in the NFL or perhaps in Major League Baseball. The customer, quite kindly, said those were noble goals, but that given the long odds, they should be sure to have a fallback position.

"And I said, 'Sir, no disrespect, but that's not what we're teaching them, ' " Al Jones recalled. " 'If they want to be in that one percent, then that's what they should be. They should follow and fulfill their dreams.' "

The first steps in that pursuit have happened in solid fashion for both.

Alem, 22, was first-team All-SEC last season and is widely recognized as the Tigers' best defensive lineman this season. Jones, 21, is beginning to blossom at free safety and has a baseball national championship ring after throwing 90 mph fastballs out of LSU's bullpen in the College World Series last June.

So just what are the one-percenters at heart?

"Chad's a momma's boy, " Alem said. "When we were growing up, he only got me one time, and I couldn't get him back because he ran to momma."

It seems a daring accusation to level at a chiseled, 6-foot-3, 222-pound athlete, a claim that was double-checked with some trepidation.

"Yup, that's true, " Jones confirmed. "I did get him that time, though."

The precise nature of the "get" remained murky, but Alem and Jones said they did not spare the physicality when they tangled as youths. It was a situation that prevailed in the Jones' household until Al, recognizing the clear and present danger to domestic tranquillity posed by two rambunctious boys who were shaping up as SEC football players, put the kibosh on such activity.

Patti Jones brushed off the "momma's boy" assessment as the couple chatted about their sons in the family's kitchen in south Baton Rouge. She, too, felt the home's floorboards move as her sons faced off in their younger days, but that part never concerned her as much as watching them on the football field. She finds the experience of watching them play exhilarating but to this day worries about them on every snap.

"Especially the punt returns, " she said, pantomiming Jones back deep to catch a punt. "But then I'll see his big brother out there tackling two or three guys to protect him."

Her unfamiliarity with football jargon is understandable, given her career as an engineer with NASA who holds a graduate degree from the University of Wisconsin. Al Jones is a Tulane man who captained the Green Wave football team in 1978 and now serves as a high school principal with the Recovery School District in New Orleans. As such parental resumes would indicate, education was a priority in the Jones household.

That was a household that used to stand in eastern New Orleans. Al Jones was principal at Desire Street Academy, the school founded by former Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel, Patti Jones was at NASA's Michoud facility, and Rahim was a student at St. Augustine desperately hoping to get a solid lick on that pest, Chad.

And there the happy family could have stayed had not Hurricane Katrina roared ashore and wiped out the Joneses by depositing 5 to 7 feet of water in their home for two weeks. The family relocated to Baton Rouge, where Patti grew up and had family, and Rahim went to LSU and Chad to Southern Lab. In 2007, Jones enrolled at LSU as a celebrated two-sport star, joining his brother on the gridiron.

But if their athletic stature at LSU always seemed a sure thing, it was not something that came to them automatically. Alem became engrossed in African-American studies, changed his name (to the initial chagrin of his father) and found himself embroiled in a public dispute with fans who displayed purple-and-gold Confederate flags.

LSU Coach Les Miles said he had no problem with Alem's position on the issue but was uncomfortable with a freshman who did not play taking such a high-profile stance that might prove a distraction. That, too, eventually resolved itself, and midway through the 2008 season, Miles said Alem had matured more than any other player during the coach's tenure in Baton Rouge.

Alem might be the most expressive player on the team. He digests every question, and while his answers tend to be short, he packs a lot of clarity and emotion into them ("I guess we haven't lost in such a theatrical way before, " he said after the recent Ole Miss game).

"I wasn't taking a public stance as a football player, " he said recently when discussing his early years at LSU. "I was doing that as Rahim Alem, as a student at LSU."

He said it was in his junior year, when he had eight sacks and 11.5 tackles for losses, that he began to feel "an ownership stake" in the team. His father said Alem talked to him about the same transformation; about how it was one thing to be a player on the team, another as an athlete at LSU from whom much is expected.

By the time the 2009 season began, Alem was an established leader. At first, still somewhat fearful about his forthright manner, athletic department officials would sometimes hover around Alem during interviews, ready to step in if the discussion veered into uncomfortable territory. Those days have passed, and now when Alem speaks, the program's workers are as likely as reporters to crowd around just to listen to his always honest and often entertaining remarks.

Alem is 6-3, 254 pounds. He is quiet and bald ("I'll never be able to have dreadlocks like Chad, " Alem said once wistfully). Chad remains a different sort of man. He's lithe and chatty. He's like a surfer. His droopy hairdo and easy manner -- and his position on the field -- recall an earlier LSU star at safety, Craig Steltz.

But Jones, too, experienced his growing pains at LSU. He arrived proclaiming baseball was "always his first love, " but his sometimes-cavalier approach to the game proved maddening to Coach Paul Mainieri. Last spring, Mainieri said Jones would join the football team full time for drills, and when the past baseball season began, Mainieri openly wondered if he should save a roster spot for Jones. Instead, Jones, who has a 1-year-old son, halted his immature behavior. Today, Mainieri talks about Jones in almost precisely the same way Miles talks about Alem.

"No, that's fair, that's true, " Jones said once when asked if he took issue with Mainieri's claim Jones "had grown up."

Inside the Jones home in Baton Rouge or the parents' new apartment in River Ridge, there was never any doubt the brothers would find their way.

"Their success was a thing that we talked about at the dinner table, " Al Jones said. "But what I really admire about them both is that when they do something, they have their reasons and they can state their reasons to you clearly."